packing for mars. the curious science of life in the void - mary roach

PACKING FOR MARS
ALSO BY MARY ROACH
Stiff: The Curious Lives
of Human Cadavers
Spook: Science
Tackles the Afterlife
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
PACKING FOR MARS
THE CURIOUS SCIENCE OF LIFE IN THE VOID
MARY ROACH
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY NEW YORK LONDON
Copyright © 2010 by Mary Roach
All rights reserved
Photograph credits: Frontmatter: © Hamilton Sundstrand Corporation 2010.
All rights reserved; Chapter 1: Image by Deirdre O’Dwyer; Chapter 2: Dmitri Kessel / Time & Life
Pictures / Getty Images; Chapter 3: Courtesy of NASA; Chapter 4: CBS Photo Archive / Hulton
Archive / Getty Images; Chapter 5: Courtesy of NASA; Chapter 6: Image Source / Getty Images;
Chapter 7: Courtesy of NASA; Chapter 8: Bettman/Corbis; Chapter 9: Ryan McVay / Riser / Getty
Images; Chapter 10: Courtesy of NASA; Chapter 11: Hulton Archive / Getty Images; Chapter 12:
Joanna McCarthy / Riser / Getty Images; Chapter 13: Hulton Archive / Getty Images; Chapter 14:
Courtesy of NASA; Chapter 15: Courtesy of NASA; Chapter 16: Tim Flach / Stone+ / Getty Images
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W.
W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roach, Mary.
Packing for Mars: the curious science of life in the void / Mary Roach.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-0-393-07910-4
1. Space biology—Popular works. I. Title.

QH327.R63 2010
571.0919—dc22
2010017113
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
For Jay Mandel and Jill Bialosky,
with cosmic gratitude
CONTENTS
Countdown
1 HE’S SMART BUT HIS BIRDS ARE SLOPPY
Japan Picks an Astronaut
2 LIFE IN A BOX
The Perilous Psychology of Isolation and Confinement
3 STAR CRAZY
Can Space Blow Your Mind?
4 YOU GO FIRST
The Alarming Prospect of Life Without Gravity
5 UNSTOWED
Escaping Gravity on Board NASA’s C-9
6 THROWING UP AND DOWN
The Astronaut’s Secret Misery
7 THE CADAVER IN THE SPACE CAPSULE
NASA Visits the Crash Test Lab
8 ONE FURRY STEP FOR MANKIND
The Strange Careers of Ham and Enos
9 NEXT GAS: 200,000 MILES
Planning a Moon Expedition Is Tough, but Not as Tough as Planning a

Simulated One
10 HOUSTON, WE HAVE A FUNGUS
Space Hygiene and the Men Who Stopped Bathing for Science
11 THE HORIZONTAL STUFF
What If You Never Got Out of Bed?
12 THE THREE-DOLPHIN CLUB
Mating Without Gravity
13 WITHERING HEIGHTS
Bailing Out from Space
14 SEPARATION ANXIETY
The Continuing Saga of Zero-Gravity Elimination
15 DISCOMFORT FOOD
When Veterinarians Make Dinner, and Other Tales of Woe from Aerospace Test
Kitchens
16 EATING YOUR PANTS
Is Mars Worth It?
Acknowledgments
Time Line
Bibliography
PACKING FOR MARS
COUNTDOWN
To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or
she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame
that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You’re inconstant. You take
weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you’ll need in space,
about how much extra fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A
solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete or panic or fall in love
with the mission commander. It has no ego. Its structural elements don’t start to break down without
gravity, and it works just fine without sleep.

To me, you are the best thing to happen to rocket science. The human being is the machine that
makes the whole endeavor so endlessly intriguing. To take an organism whose every feature has
evolved to keep it alive and thriving in a world with oxygen, gravity, and water, to suspend that
organism in the wasteland of space for a month or a year, is a preposterous but captivating
undertaking. Everything one takes for granted on Earth must be rethought, relearned, rehearsed—full-
grown men and women toilet-trained, a chimpanzee dressed in a flight suit and launched into orbit.
An entire odd universe of mock outer space has grown up here on Earth. Capsules that never blast off;
hospital wards where healthy people spend months on their backs, masquerading zero gravity; crash
labs where cadavers drop to Earth in simulated splash-downs.
A couple years back, a friend at NASA had been working on something over in Building 9 at the
Johnson Space Center. This is the building with the mock-ups, some fifty in all—modules, airlocks,
hatches, capsules. For days, Rene had been hearing an intermittent, squeaking racket. Finally, he went
to investigate. “Some poor guy in a spacesuit running on a treadmill suspended from a big
complicated gizmo to simulate Martian gravity. Lots of clipboards and timers and radio headsets and
concerned looks all around.” It occurred to me, reading his email, that it’s possible, in a way, to visit
space without leaving Earth. Or anyway, a sort of slapstick-surreal make-believe edition. Which is
more or less where I’ve been these past two years.
OF THE MILLIONS of pages of documents and reports generated by the first moon landing,
none is more telling, to me anyway, than an eleven-page paper presented at the twenty-sixth annual
meeting of the North American Vexillological Association. Vexillology is the study of flags, not the
study of vexing things, but in this case, either would fit. The paper is entitled “Where No Flag Has
Gone Before: Political and Technical Aspects of Placing a Flag on the Moon.”
It began with meetings, five months before the Apollo 11 launch. The newly formed Committee
on Symbolic Activities for the First Lunar Landing gathered to debate the appropriateness of planting
a flag on the moon. The Outer Space Treaty, of which the United States is a signer, prohibits claims of
sovereignty upon celestial bodies. Was it possible to plant a flag without appearing to be, as one
committee member put it, “taking possession of the moon”? A telegenically inferior plan to use a
boxed set of miniature flags of all nations was considered and rejected. The flag would fly.
But not without help from the NASA Technical Services Division. A flag doesn’t fly without
wind. The moon has no atmosphere to speak of, and thus no wind. And though it has only about a sixth

the gravity of Earth, that is enough to bring a flag down in an inglorious droop. So a crossbar was
hinged to the pole and a hem sewn along the top of the flag. Now the Stars and Stripes would appear
to be flying in a brisk wind—convincingly enough to prompt decades of moon hoax jabber—though in
fact it was hanging, less a flag than a diminutive patriotic curtain.
Challenges remained. How do you fit a flagpole into the cramped, overpacked confines of a
Lunar Module? Engineers were sent off to design a collapsible pole and crossbar. Even then, there
wasn’t room. The Lunar Flag Assembly—as flag, pole, and crossbar had inevitably come to be
known—would have to be mounted on the outside of the lander. But this meant it would have to
withstand the 2,000-degree Fahrenheit heat generated by the nearby descent engine. Tests were
undertaken. The flag melted at 300 degrees. The Structures and Mechanics Division was called in,
and a protective case was fashioned from layers of aluminum, steel, and Thermoflex insulation.
Just as it was beginning to look as though the flag was finally ready, someone pointed out that the
astronauts, owing to the pressurized suits they’d be wearing, would have limited grip strength and
range of motion. Would they be able to extract the flag assembly from its insulated sheath? Or would
they stand there in the gaze of millions, grasping futilely? Did they have the reach needed to extend the
telescoping segments? Only one way to know: Prototypes were made and the crew convened for a
series of flag-assembly deployment simulations.
Finally came the day. The flag was packed (a four-step procedure supervised by the chief of
quality assurance) and mounted on the Lunar Module (eleven steps), and off it went to the moon.
Where the telescoping crossbar wouldn’t fully extend and the lunar soil was so hard that Neil
Armstrong couldn’t plant the staff more than about 6 or 8 inches down, creating conjecture that the
flag was most likely blown over by the engine blast of the Ascent Module.
Welcome to space. Not the parts you see on TV, the triumphs and the tragedies, but the stuff in
between—the small comedies and everyday victories. What drew me to the topic of space
exploration was not the heroics and adventure stories, but the very human and sometimes absurd
struggles behind them. The Apollo astronaut who worried that he, personally, was about to lose the
moon race for the United States by throwing up on the morning of his spacewalk, causing talk of
tabling it. Or the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, recalling that as he walked the red carpet before
the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and a cheering
crowd of thousands, he noticed that his shoelace was undone and could think of nothing else.

At the end of the Apollo program, astronauts were interviewed to get their feedback on a range
of topics. One of the questions: If an astronaut were to die outside the spacecraft during a spacewalk,
what should you do? “Cut him loose,” read one of the answers. All agreed: An attempt to recover the
body could endanger other crew members’ lives. Only a person who has experienced firsthand the not
insignificant struggle of entering a space capsule in a pressurized suit could so unequivocally utter
those words. Only someone who has drifted free in the unlimited stretch of the universe could
understand that burial in space, like the sailor’s burial at sea, holds not disrespect but honor. In orbit,
everything gets turned on its head. Shooting stars streak past below you, and the sun rises in the
middle of the night. Space exploration is in some ways an exploration of what it means to be human.
How much normalcy can people forgo? For how long, and what does it do to them?
Early in my research, I came across a moment—forty minutes into the eighty-eighth hour of
Gemini VII—which, for me, sums up the astronaut experience and why it fascinates me. Astronaut Jim
Lovell is telling Mission Control about an image he has captured on film—“a beautiful shot of a full
Moon against the black sky and the strato formations of the clouds of the earth below,” reads the
mission transcript. After a momentary silence, Lovell’s crewmate Frank Borman presses the TALK
button. “Borman’s dumping urine. Urine [in] approximately one minute.”
Two lines further along, we see Lovell saying, “What a sight to behold!” We don’t know what
he’s referring to, but there’s a good chance it’s not the moon. According to more than one astronaut
memoir, one of the most beautiful sights in space is that of a sun-illumined flurry of flash-frozen
waste-water droplets. Space doesn’t just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line
between.
HE’S SMART BUT HIS BIRDS ARE SLOPPY
Japan Picks an Astronaut

First you remove your shoes, as you would upon entering a Japanese home. You are given a
pair of special isolation chamber slippers, light blue vinyl imprinted with the Japan Aerospace
Exploration Agency logo, the letters JAXA leaning forward as though rushing into space at terrific
speed. The isolation chamber, a freestanding structure inside building C-5 at JAXA’s headquarters in
Tsukuba Science City, is in fact a home of sorts, for one week, for the ten finalists competing for two

openings in the Japanese astronaut corps. When I came here last month, there wasn’t much to see—a
bedroom with curtained “sleeping boxes,” and an adjoining common room with a long dining table
and chairs. It’s more about being seen. Five closed-circuit cameras mounted near the ceiling allow a
panel of psychiatrists, psychologists, and JAXA managers to observe the applicants. To a large
extent, their behavior and the panel’s impressions of them during their stay will determine which two
will wear the JAXA logo on spacesuits instead of slippers.
The idea is to get a better sense of who these men and women are, and how well they’re suited
to life in space. An intelligent, highly motivated person can hide undesirable facets of his or her
character in an interview
*
or on a questionnaire—which together have weeded out applicants with
obvious personality disorders—but not so easily under a weeklong observation. In the words of
JAXA psychologist Natsuhiko Inoue, “It’s difficult to be a good man always.” Isolation chambers are
also a way to judge things like teamwork, leadership, and conflict management—group skills that
can’t be assessed in a one-on-one interview. (NASA does not use isolation chambers.)
The observation room is upstairs from the chamber. It is Wednesday, day three of the seven-day
isolation. A row of closed-circuit TVs are lined up for the observers, who sit at long tables with their
notepads and cups of tea. Three are here now, university psychiatrists and psychologists, staring at
the TVs like customers at Best Buy contemplating a purchase. One TV, inexplicably, is broadcasting a
daytime talk show.
Inoue sits at the control console, with its camera zooms and microphone controls and a second
bank of tiny TV monitors above his head. At forty, he is accomplished for his age and widely
respected in the field of space psychology, yet something in his appearance and demeanor makes you
want to reach over and pinch his cheek. Like many male employees here, he wears open-toed slippers
over socks. As an American, I have large gaps in my understanding of Japanese slipper etiquette, but
to me it suggests that JAXA, as much as his house, feels like home. For this week, anyway, it would
be understandable; his shift begins at 6 A.M. and ends just after 10 P.M.
On camera now, one of the applicants can be seen lifting a stack of 9-by-11-inch envelopes from
a cardboard box. Each envelope is labeled with an applicant’s identifying letter—A through J—and
contains a sheet of instructions and a square, flat cellophane-wrapped package. Inoue says the

materials are for a test of patience and accuracy under pressure. The candidates tear open the
packages and pull out sheaves of colored paper squares. “The test is involving…I am sorry, I don’t
know the word in English. A form of paper craft.”
“Origami?”
“Origami, yes!” Earlier today, I used the handicapped stall in the hallway bathroom. On the wall
was a confusing panel of levers, toggles, pull chains. It was like the cockpit of the Space Shuttle. I
yanked a pull-chain, aiming to flush, and set off the emergency Nurse Call alarm. I’m wearing pretty
much the same face right now. It’s my Wha? face. For the next hour and a half, the men and women
who vie to become Japan’s next astronauts, heroes to their countrymen, will be making paper cranes.
“One thousand cranes.” JAXA’s chief medical officer, Shoichi Tachibana, introduces himself.
He’s been standing quietly behind us. Tachibana came up with the test. A Japanese tradition holds
that a person who folds a thousand cranes will be granted health and longevity. (The gift is apparently
transferable; the cranes, strung on lengths of thread, are typically given to patients in hospitals.) Later,
Tachibana will place a perfect yellow crane, hardly bigger than a grasshopper, onto the table where I
sit. A tiny dinosaur will appear on the arm of the sofa in the corner. He’s like one of those creepy
movie villains who sneak into the hero’s home and leave behind a tiny origami animal, their creepy
villain calling card, just to let him know they were there. Or, you know, a guy who enjoys origami.
The applicants have until Sunday to finish the cranes. Paper squares are spread across the table,
the vibrancy of the colors played up by the drabness of the room. Along with the shoebox architecture
and the rockets reclining around the grounds, JAXA has managed to duplicate the uniquely
unappealing green-gray you often see on NASA interior walls. It’s a color I have seen nowhere else
and on no paint chip, yet here it is.
The genius of the Thousand Cranes test is that it creates a chronological record of each
candidate’s work. As they complete their cranes, candidates string them on a single long thread. At
the end of the isolation, everyone’s string of cranes will be taken away and analyzed. It’s forensic
origami: As the deadline nears and the pressure increases, do the candidate’s creases become
sloppy? How do the first ten cranes compare to the last? “Deterioration of accuracy shows
impatience under stress,” Inoue says.
I have been told that 90 percent of a typical mission on the International Space Station (ISS) is
devoted to assembling, repairing, or maintaining the spacecraft itself. It’s rote work, much of it done

while wearing a pressurized suit with a limited oxygen supply—a ticking clock. Astronaut Lee Morin
described his role in installing the midsection of the ISS truss, the backbone to which various
laboratory modules are attached. “It’s held on with thirty bolts. I personally tightened twelve of
them.” (“So that’s two years of education for each bolt,” he couldn’t help adding.) The spacesuit
systems lab at Johnson Space Center has a glove box that mimics the vacuum of space and inflates a
pair of pressurized gloves. In the box with the gloves is one of the heavy-duty carabiners that tether
astronauts and their tools to the exterior of the space station while they work. Trying to work the
tether is like dealing cards with oven mitts on. Simply closing one’s fist tires the hand within minutes.
You cannot be the sort of person who gets frustrated easily and turns in a haphazard performance.
An hour passes. One of the psychiatrists has stopped watching and turned his attention to the talk
show. A young actor is being interviewed about his wedding and what kind of father he hopes to be.
The candidates are bent over the table, working quietly. Applicant A, an orthopedist and aikido
enthusiast, is in the lead with fourteen cranes. Most of the rest have managed seven or eight. The
instructions are two pages long. My interpreter Sayuri is folding a piece of notebook paper. She is at
step 21, where the crane’s body is inflated. The directions show a tiny puff beside an arrow pointing
at the bird. It makes sense if you already know what to do. Otherwise, it’s wonderfully surreal: Put a
cloud inside a bird.
IT IS DIFFICULT, though delightful, to picture John Glenn or Alan Shepard applying his talents
to the ancient art of paper-folding. America’s first astronauts were selected by balls and charisma.
All seven Mercury astronauts, by requirement, were active or former test pilots. These were men
whose nine-to-five involved breaking altitude records and sound barriers while nearly passing out
and crashing in screaming-fast fighter jets. Up through Apollo 11, every mission included a major
NASA first. First trip to space, first orbit, first spacewalk, first docking maneuver, first lunar landing.
Seriously hairy shit was going down on a regular basis.
With each successive mission, space exploration became a little more routine. To the point,
incredibly, of boredom. “Funny thing happened on the way to the moon: not much,” wrote Apollo 17
astronaut Gene Cernan. “Should have brought some crossword puzzles.” The close of the Apollo
program marked a shift from exploration to experimentation. Astronauts traveled no farther than the
fringes of the Earth’s atmosphere to assemble orbiting science labs—Skylab, Spacelab, Mir, ISS.
They carried out zero-gravity experiments, launched communications and Defense Department

satellites, installed new toilets. “Life on Mir was mostly mundane,” says astronaut Norm Thagard in
the space history journal Quest. “Boredom was the most common problem I had.” Mike Mullane
summed up his first Space Shuttle mission as “throwing a few toggle switches to release a couple
comms satellites.” There are still firsts, and NASA proudly lists them, but they don’t make headlines.
Firsts for shuttle mission STS-110, for instance, include “first time that all of a shuttle crew’s
spacewalks were based from the station’s Quest Airlock.” “Capacity to Tolerate Boredom and Low
Levels of Stimulation” is one of the recommended attributes on a Space Shuttle–era document drafted
by the NASA In-House Working Group on Psychiatric and Psychological Selection of Astronauts.
These days the astronaut job title has been split into two categories. (Three, counting payload
specialist, the category into which teachers, boondoggling senators,
*
and junketing Saudi princes
fall.) Pilot astronauts are the ones at the controls. Mission specialist astronauts carry out the science
experiments, make the repairs, launch the satellites. They’re still the best and the brightest, but not by
necessity the boldest. They’re doctors, biologists, engineers. Astronauts these days are as likely to be
nerds as heroes. (JAXA astronauts on the ISS thus far have been classified as NASA mission
specialists. The ISS includes a JAXA-built laboratory module, called Kibo.) The most stressful part
of being an astronaut, Tachibana told me, is not getting to be an astronaut—not knowing whether or
when you’ll get a flight assignment.
The first time I spoke to an astronaut, I didn’t know about the pilot–mission specialist split. I
pictured astronauts, all of them, as they were in the Apollo footage: faceless icons behind gold visors,
bounding like antelopes in the moon’s weak gravity. The astronaut was Lee Morin. Mission
Specialist Morin is a big, soft-spoken man. One foot turns in slightly as he walks. He was dressed in
chinos and brown shoes the day we met. There were sailboats and hibiscus flowers on his shirt. He
told me a story about how he helped test the lubricant for a launch-pad escape slide on the Space
Shuttle. “They had us bend over and they brushed our butts with it. And then we jumped on the slide.
And it passed, so [the shuttle mission] could go forward and the space station could be built. I was
proud,” he deadpanned, “to do my part for the mission.”
I remember watching Morin walk away from me, the endearing gait and the butt that got lubed
for science, and thinking, “Oh my god, they’re just people.”

NASA funding has depended in no small part upon the larger-than-life mythology. The imagery
forged during Mercury and Apollo remains largely intact. In official NASA 8-by-10 astronaut
glossies, many still wear spacesuits, still hold their helmets in their laps, as though at any moment the
Johnson Space Center photography studio might inexplicably depressurize. In reality, maybe 1
percent of an astronaut’s career takes place in space, and 1 percent of that is done in a pressure suit.
Morin was on hand that day as a member of the Cockpit Working Group for the Orion space capsule.
He was helping figure out sight lines and optimal placement of computer displays. Between flights,
astronauts spend their days in meetings and on committees, speaking at schools and Rotary clubs,
evaluating software and hardware, working at Mission Control, and otherwise, as they say, flying a
desk.
Not that bravery has been entirely phased out. Those recommended astronaut attributes also
include “Ability to Function Despite Imminent Catastrophe.” If something goes wrong, everyone’s
clarity of mind is needed. Some selection committees—the Canadian Space Agency’s, for instance—
appear to put greater emphasis on disaster coping skills. Highlights of CSA’s 2009 astronaut
selection testing were posted in installments on the Web site home page. It was reality television. The
candidates were sent to a damage-control training facility, where they learned to escape burning
space capsules and sinking helicopters. They leapt feetfirst into swimming pools from terrifying
heights while wave generators pushed 5-foot swells. A percussive action-movie soundtrack ramped
up the drama. (It is possible the footage had more to do with attracting media coverage than with the
realities of choosing Canada’s next astronaut.)
Earlier, I asked Tachibana whether he was planning to pull any surprises on his candidates, to
see how they cope under the stress of a sudden emergency. He told me he had given thought to
disabling the isolation chamber toilet. Again, not the answer I was expecting, but genius in its way.
The footage might not play as well with a kettledrum soundtrack (and then again it might), but it’s a
more apt scenario. A broken toilet is not only more representative of the challenges of space travel,
but—as we’ll see in chapter 14—stressful in its own right.
“Before you arrived yesterday,” Tachibana added, “we delayed lunch by one hour.” The little
things can be big tells. Unaware that a late lunch or a malfunctioning toilet is part of the test, the
applicants behave truer to character. When I first began this book, I applied to be a subject in a
simulated Mars mission. I made it past the first round of cuts and was told that someone from the

European Space Agency would call me for a phone interview later in the month. The call came at
4:30 A.M., and I did not take care to hide my irritation. I realized later that it had probably been a
test, and I had failed it.
NASA uses similar tactics. They’ll call an applicant and tell her that they need to redo a couple
tests on her physical and that they need to do it the following day. “What they’re really doing is
saying, ‘Let’s see if they’ll drop everything to be one of us,’” says planetary geologist Ralph Harvey,
whose Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) program personnel sometimes apply for astronaut
openings. (Antarctica is a useful analog for space, and people who thrive there are thought to be
psychologically well equipped for the isolation and confinement of space travel.) Harvey recently got
a call about one such applicant. “They said, ‘We’re going to give him a T-38 to fly for the first time
tomorrow. And we’d like you to go along with him as an observer and tell us how you think he’s
doing.’ And I said, ‘Absolutely.’ But I knew that wasn’t going to happen. What they were doing was
assessing my confidence level in the person.”
Another reason to see how would-be astronauts handle stress is that options for reducing it are
limited on board a spaceship. “Shopping, let’s say,” says Tachibana. “You cannot do such a thing.”
Or drinking. “Or a long bath,” adds Kumiko Tanabe, who handles press and publicity for JAXA and
thus, I suspect, takes lots of long baths.
LUNCH HAS ARRIVED, and all ten candidates get up to unpack the containers and set out
plates. They sit down again, but no one picks up chopsticks. You can tell they’re strategizing. Does
taking the first bite show leadership, or does it suggest impatience and self-indulgence? Applicant A,
the physician, comes up with what seems an ideal solution. “Bon appétit,” he says to the group. He
picks up his chopsticks as the others do, but then waits for someone else to take the first bite. Canny.
I’ve got my money on A.
Here’s the other thing that’s changed since the heyday of space exploration. Crews aboard space
shuttles and orbiting science labs are two or three times the size of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo
crews, and the missions span weeks or months, not days. This makes the Mercury-era “right stuff” the
wrong stuff. Astronauts have to be people who play well with others. NASA’s recommended
astronaut attribute list includes an Ability to Relate to Others with Sensitivity, Regard, and Empathy.
Adaptability, Flexibility, Fairness. Sense of Humor. An Ability to Form Stable and Quality
Interpersonal Relationships. Today’s space agency doesn’t want guts and swagger. They want

Richard Gere in Nights in Rodanthe.
*
Assertiveness has to be “Appropriate” and Risk-Taking
Behavior has to be “Healthy.” The right stuff is no longer bravado, aggressiveness, and virility. Or as
Patricia Santy, NASA’s first staff psychiatrist, put it in Choosing the Right Stuff, “narcissism,
arrogance, and interpersonal insensitivity.” “Who,” she asks, “would want to work with a person like
that?”
As a gross overgeneralization, the Japanese are well suited to life on a space station. They’re
accustomed to small spaces and limited privacy. They’re a lighter, more compact payload than the
average American. Perhaps most important, they’re raised to be polite and to keep their emotions in
check. My interpreter, Sayuri, a woman so considerate she wipes the lipstick off the edge of her
teacup before handing it to the JAXA cafeteria dishwashers, says her parents used to tell her, “Don’t
make waves on the quiet surface of the pond.” Being an astronaut, she noted, is “an extension of
everyday life.” “They make excellent astronauts,” agreed Space Shuttle crew member Roger Crouch,
whom I had been emailing during my stay in Japan.
I ran my theory by Tachibana. We had gone down to the lobby to chat. We sat on low sofas
arranged beneath portraits of the JAXA astronaut corps. “What you say is true,” he said, one knee
bobbing up and down. (His boss told me when I’d visited earlier in the year that leg-bobbing is
viewed as a red flag during astronaut selection interviews, along with failure to make eye contact.
For the remainder of the conversation, the boss and I stared intently at each other across the table,
both refusing to look away.) “We Japanese have a tendency to suppress emotion and try to cooperate,
try to adapt, too much. I worry that some of our astronauts behave too much well.” Suppressing one’s
feelings too tightly for too long takes a toll. You either explode or implode. “Most Japanese will
become depressive rather than explosive,” says Tachibana. Fortunately, he adds, JAXA astronauts
train with NASA astronauts for several years, and during those years “their character becomes
somewhat more aggressive and like Americans.”
In the previous isolation-chamber test, one applicant was eliminated because he expressed too
much irritation and another because he was unable to express his irritation and acted it out passively.
Tachibana and Inoue look for applicants who manage to achieve a balance. NASA astronaut Peggy
Whitson strikes me as a good example. On NASA TV recently, I heard someone at NASA tell her that

he could not find a series of photographs that she or some member of her crew had recently taken. If
I’d spent the morning shooting photographs and the person I’d shot them for then misplaced them, I’d
say, “Look again, lamb chop.” Whitson said, without a trace of irritation, “That’s not a problem. We
can do them over.”
Anything else to avoid should you wish to become an astronaut?
Snoring, says Tachibana. If it’s loud enough, it can mean elimination from the selection process.
“It wakes people up.”
According to the Yangtse Evening Post, the medical screening for Chinese astronauts excludes
candidates with bad breath. Not because it might suggest gum disease, but because, in the words of
health screening official Shi Bing Bing, “the bad smell would affect their fellow colleagues in a
narrow space.”
LUNCH IS OVER, and two—now three, wait, four!—of the candidates are cleaning the surface
of the table. I’m reminded of those brushless car washes where a small army of wiping employees
descends on your vehicle as it exits the wash. But no one has to clean the dishes. The instructions are
to put your dirty plates and utensils back inside the plastic tub labeled with your I.D. letter, and to put
the tubs in the “airlock.” What the candidates don’t know is that the dirty dishes are then loaded onto
a dolly and wheeled away to be photographed. The photos will be delivered to the psychiatrists and
psychologists, along with the origami birds. I watched the photo shoot after last night’s meal. The
photographer’s assistant opens each tub and holds a piece of cardboard printed with the candidate’s
letter and the date just inside the bottom of the frame, as though the place setting had been picked up
for a crime and was now being posed for a mug shot.
Inoue was vague about the purpose. To see what they ate, he said. For what it’s worth, C didn’t
eat her chicken skin, and G left the seaweed in his miso soup. E left half his soup and all his pickled
vegetables. My man A ate everything and placed it back in the container in the same precise
configuration in which it had arrived.
“Look at G-san,” tutted the photographer. (“San” is a Japanese honorific, like our “Mr.” or
“Ms.”) He lifted the pickle dish that G had placed on top of the dinner plate. “He’s hiding his skin.”
I’m not sure I understand why it’s important that astronauts clean their plates and stack their dirty
dishes. Tidiness is certainly important in a small space, but I think this is about something else. If I
showed a stranger a list of the activities I’ve been observing these past few days and asked him to

guess where I’d been, I doubt “space agency” would leap to mind. “Grade school” might. In addition
to origami, the tests this week have involved building LEGO robots and making colored-pencil
drawings of “Me and My Colleagues” (also destined for the mental health professionals’ in-boxes).
Right now, H is on the TV screens, addressing his colleagues and the cameras. The activity is
called “self-merits presentation.” I had expected something along the lines of a one-way job
interview, a recitation of character strengths and job skills. This is more like a summer camp talent
show act. C’s talent was singing songs in four languages. D did forty push-ups in thirty seconds.
Adding to the overall schoolyard ambiance, the candidates wear pinnies. They’re the sort of
thing kids used to wear during gym class to help them keep track of who’s on what team. These have
candidates’ letters printed on them. They are for the observers. The lighting is poor and the camera
rarely zooms in on faces, so it’s hard to figure out who’s talking. Before the pinnies went on,
everyone was constantly leaning over and whispering to their neighbor. “Who’s that? E-san?” “I think
it’s J-san.” “No, J-san is there, with the stripes.”
H is saying: “I can ride a bike without holding the handle-bars.” Now he cups his hands together
and puts his lips to his bent thumbs. After a few tries, he produces a low, dry, unmusical whistle. “I
don’t have a skill like yours,” H says to B glumly. B just finished telling us about the badminton
championship his team won and then pulling up the legs of his shorts to show off his thigh muscles.
H sits down, and F stands up. F is one of three pilots in the group. “What is important in a pilot
is communication.” After a solid start, the presentation takes an unexpected turn. F tells us that he
often goes out drinking with his pals. “We go to places where ladies entertain. That helps to
communicate and help break the ice with the guys.” F opens his mouth wide. He’s doing something
with his tongue. The psychiatrists lean toward the TVs. Sayuri’s eyebrows shoot up. “I do this for the
ladies,” says F. Wha? Inoue pulls the zoom. F’s tongue is double-curled, like a pair of tacos. “For me
it is an ice-breaking technique.”
My guy A is up next. He tells us he is going to demonstrate an aikido technique and asks for a
volunteer. D stands up. His pinnie is partly slipping off his shoulder like a bra strap. A says that when
he was in college, the younger students would get so drunk they couldn’t move. “So I twist their arm
to help them get up.” He grabs D’s wrist. D yelps, and everyone laughs.
“They’re like frat boys,” I say to Sayuri. Tachibana is sitting beside Sayuri, who explains “frat
boy” to him.

“To tell you the truth,” Tachibana says, “astronaut is a kind of college student.” He is given
assignments. Decisions are made for him. Going into space is like attending a very small, very elite
military boarding school. Instead of sergeants and deans, there is space agency management. It’s hard
work, and you better stick to the rules. Don’t talk about other astronauts. Don’t use cuss words.
*
Never complain. As in the military, wave-makers are leaned on hard or sent away.
All through the space station era, the ideal astronaut has been an exceptionally high-achieving
adult who takes direction and follows rules like an exceptionally well-behaved child. Japan cranks
them out. This is a culture where almost no one jaywalks or litters. People don’t tend to confront
authority. My seatmate on the flight to Tokyo told me that her mother had forbidden her to get her ears
pierced. It wasn’t until she was thirty-seven that she summoned the courage to do it anyway. “I’m just
now learning to stand up to her,” she confided. She was forty-seven, and her mother was eighty-six.
“Of course, exploration to Mars will be a different story,” says Tachibana. “You need someone
aggressive, creative. Because they’ll have to do everything by themselves.” With a twenty-minute
radio transmission lag time, you can’t rely on advice from ground control in an emergency. “You need
again a brave man.”
A FEW WEEKS after I left Tokyo, an email arrived from the JAXA Public Affairs Office,
informing me that candidates E and G had been selected. E is a pilot with All Nippon Airways and a
fan of Japanese musicals. For his self-merits presentation, he acted out a scene from his favorite
musical. The scene required E to pretend to weep and wrap his arms around his invisible mother. It
was brave, though not in an astronaut sort of way. G is also a pilot—with the Japan Air Self-Defense
Force. Military pilots have always been a good fit for the astronaut corps, and not just because of
their aviation background and skills. They’re used to taking risks and operating under pressure, used
to bunking in cramped quarters with no privacy, used to following orders and enduring long
separations from their families. Also, as one JAXA staffer pointed out, astronaut selection is
political. Air forces have always had ties to space agencies.
The week after I left Japan, all ten candidates flew to Johnson Space Center for interviews with
NASA astronauts and selection committee members. Tachibana and Inoue conceded that the
applicants’ English skills were an important factor in the decision, as was, I imagine, how well they
click with the NASA crews. “The most important part of all this, the heart of the process,” says

ANSMET’s Ralph Harvey, “is the interview where they sit you down with a couple astronauts and
you just talk. You’re someone they may end up stuck in the equivalent of a tent in Antarctica with, for
not just six weeks or six months in the space station, but maybe ten years as you’re waiting to fly,
working at Mission Control or elsewhere. They’re picking a buddy as much as they’re picking a work
partner.” A Japanese pilot has an advantage over a doctor in that he has something in common with a
lot of NASA astronauts. The military and aviation are global fraternities, and E and G are members.
THE FIRST TIME I visited JAXA, I traveled with a different interpreter. As we drove along the
route from the train station, Manami translated some of the signs. One welcomed us to TSUKUBA,
CITY OF SCIENCE AND NATURE. I had always heard it called Tsukuba Science City. Not only
JAXA is here, but also the Agricultural Research Institutes, the National Institute for Materials
Science, the Building Research Institute, the Forestry and Forest Products Institute, the National
Institute for Rural Engineering, and the Central Research Institute for Feed and Livestock. There are
so many research institutes here that they have their own institute: the Tsukuba Center for Institutes.
So what’s with the “and Nature” in the city’s name? Manami explained that when people first moved
to Tsukuba, there weren’t any trees or parks or anything to do other than work. No major roads or
express trains led into or out of the city. People just worked and worked. There were a lot of
suicides, she said, a lot of people jumping off the institute roofs. So the government built a mall and
some parks and planted trees and grass, and changed the name to Tsukuba, City of Science and
Nature. It seemed to help.
The story made me think about a trip to Mars and what it would be like to spend two years
trapped inside sterile, man-made structures with no way to escape one’s work and colleagues and no
flowers or trees or sex and nothing to look at outside the window but empty space or, at best, reddish
dirt. The astronaut’s job is stressful for all the same reasons yours or mine is—overwork, lack of
sleep, anxiety, other people—but two things compound the usual stresses: the deprivations of the
environment and one’s inability to escape it. Isolation and confinement are issues of no small concern
to space agencies. The Canadian, Russian, European, and U.S. space agencies are spending $15
million on an elaborate psychology experiment that puts six men in a simulated spaceship on a
pretend mission to Mars. The hatch opens tomorrow.